Counseling center opens in Newcomerstown

Published: July 20, 2003 8:00PM

NEWCOMERSTOWN New Life Counseling of Dover is announcing the opening of a branch clinic in Newcomerstown. New Life, a private mental health clinic, has been offering mental health assessment and treatment from their main office in Dover since 1998. Meanwhile, Newcomerstown has been without local mental health services since the community mental health system had closed its clinic there several years ago.

The new clinic was born out of talks between New Life staff and a local pastor, Stephen Sparling, who had seen the need for a local counseling center in his community. Both Sparling and Ryan Dunn, psychologist and director of New Life, emphasize that the clinic will serve the needs of the entire community and not just church-goers.

The stress of life can affect everyone, Dunn said. While we do provide Christian counseling to those who choose that alternative, New Lifes goal is to provide the best possible assessment and treatment to all of those we can.

The clinic will be staffed initially by Faith Jones, a licensed counselor whos been with New Life for several years. Shes pleased about the new clinic.

Im excited about this new opportunity and I look forward to serving and working with the people of Newcomerstown, Jones said.

Dunn and another New Life psychologist, Joseph James, will initially provide consulting services from the Dover office and likely step into direct-care roles at the clinic as the demand grows.

Among them they provide numerous services, including assessment, therapy, post-trauma treatment, hypnosis, psychological and intellectual testing, and mental health consultation for court situations. These services are provided to children, adolescents, and adults. The most common difficulties the New Life staff sees are depression, anxiety, and family or marital problems, and expect these to be similarly present in the Newcomerstown community as well.

We do a lot of family counseling and work with couples, Dunn said. Unfortunately our culture places a lot of demands and pressures on families, which can lead to a wide range of problems. Most families can handle these problems successfully with early intervention, but if let go they can cause a lot of pain and even break up families.

Our mission is to help people prevent that unnecessary pain and disruption as much as possible.

Jones will be speaking July 31 at 7 pm at Christ United Methodist Church on dealing with anxiety and depression.